James Wong Howe on Chinese Cinema

James Wong Howe is a fascinating character – born in Guangdong in 1899 he came to America as a small boy. Interested in cameras and the early movie business he got a job with Cecil B DeMille on the silents. In 1928 he returned to China to film some location shots for a movie – that movie never happened, but later Josef von Sternberg used some of the footage in Shanghai Express.

Anyway, Wong Howe was asked to contribute to the very thoughtful and now largely forgotten magazine Rob Wagner’s Script that mixed authors, actors, film folk and cultural critics together between 1929 and 1949 to produce a fascinating magazine. Wong Howe’s contribution, published in October 1945, was called Electric Shadows and it was an article dealing with Chinese cinema since the Japanese invasion and the opportunities for Chinese film in the immediate aftermath of WW2. He discusses how the traditions of lantern shows morphed into “electric shadow” shows. He throws in a few useful stats:

Pre-war China had 400 cinemas showing American films (85%), Chinese, Russian, British and French being the rest (15%).

He also talks of the possibilities of adaptations of Lu Xun and Lao She and the opporutnities for co-operation between Shanghai’s film studios and Hollywood now the Japanese have been defeated.

The whole essay is available in this collection, The Best of Rob Wagner’s Script (just $5 on Kindle)…which has a lot of other good writing on Hollywood.

James Wong Howe on the set of The Alaskan, 1924